Annalisa Bianchessi's Public Profile

About Me

Being half Italian and half Dutch, two countries with a strong connection to the sea, and having grown up in Luxembourg, where there is no sea, I have always been fascinated by the marine environment. Whilst I have been lucky enough to spend considerable time at sea (some of it studying dolphins) I am yet to really discover the underwater world. So one of my goals for 2008 is to learn how to scuba dive.

I Knew I was a Conservationist When....

I volunteered on a turtle research project on Kephallonia in Greece. The project was trying to show that, after hatching, young turtles look for the brightest horizon to find the sea. We spent night after night monitoring turtle nesting and nest hatching. It was a wonderful experience to witness these small creatures emerge from the sand and head to the sea. We would then take bearings of their route in relation to the moon and the water. One night a nest hatched in front of the then only hotel on the beach and some 80 hatchlings all headed for land. We ran to the hotel and asked them to turn off the light and shone a powerful torch onto the sea. One by one the little turtles turned around and headed for the water. It was an exhilarating spectacle. However in the morning, as we finished our shift, we noticed several structures at the back of the beach having mysteriously grown over night: whilst we were patrolled the beach to monitor the turtles at night, workers at the back of the beach were busy illegally building the hotels that were threatening the turtles’ existence. This experience as well as the rumor that the turtle project did “not care about Greek children, only about the turtles” is what made me go into conservation, and later into the social marketing of conservation.

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